We are delighted to announce that Lancashire Women has secured funding through Phase 5 of the Evaluation Accelerator Fund (EAF) – a competitive grant programme launched by the Evaluation Task Force (ETF) to support research and evaluation projects that create actionable evidence for public policy and spending decisions.

This funding will support an important and ambitious new project: Breaking Cycles of Harm.

What Is the Evaluation Accelerator Fund?

The Evaluation Accelerator Fund is a government-backed grant programme designed to address key evidence gaps, support innovative approaches to service delivery and help organisations demonstrate the effectiveness and value of their work through rigorous, independent evaluation.

Securing funding through this programme is a significant achievement and a reflection of the strength of Lancashire Women’s track record in delivering evidence-led, trauma-informed support for women across the county.

Introducing Breaking Cycles of Harm

Led by Lancashire Women through the Lancashire Female Justice Partnership, Breaking Cycles of Harm is a new evaluation project that will explore how joined-up, trauma-informed and gender-responsive support can help prevent violence against women and girls – particularly for women with overlapping and complex needs who are involved in, or at risk of entering, the criminal justice system.

Women in the criminal justice system often face a combination of challenges that are deeply interconnected: domestic abuse, mental ill health, substance use, homelessness, poverty and trauma. Too often, the services designed to support them operate in silos, making it difficult for women to access consistent, holistic care. Breaking Cycles of Harm will examine what happens when those services work together and what that means for women’s safety, stability and long-term outcomes.

Who Is Involved?

The evaluation will bring together partners from across a wide range of sectors, including criminal justice, health, housing, social care, domestic abuse services and the voluntary sector. Crucially, women with lived experience will be at the heart of the project – not as subjects of research, but as active contributors to the knowledge and recommendations it produces.

We believe that the women we work with hold the most important insights of all. Their voices will shape this evaluation from the start.

What Will the Evaluation Include?

The project will use a range of methods to build a rich, nuanced picture of how services can work together to improve outcomes for women, including:

• In-depth interviews with women with lived experience
• Workshops with practitioners and partners across the system
• Reviews of relevant documents, policies and service frameworks
• Analysis of service data to identify patterns, gaps and opportunities

 

What Will It Produce?

Breaking Cycles of Harm will generate practical, actionable outputs designed to strengthen services in Lancashire and support learning across the country:

• Practical recommendations for how services can better work together to support women with overlapping needs
• A Violence Against Women and Girls outcomes framework to help services measure and demonstrate their impact more consistently
• A transferable partnership and prevention model that can be adapted and adopted by other areas looking to improve how they support women at risk of harm

 

Why This Matters

Violence against women and girls remains one of the most pressing issues facing our society. Yet the evidence base for whole-system, prevention-focused approaches remains underdeveloped – particularly for women with complex and overlapping needs.

Breaking Cycles of Harm represents a genuine opportunity to change that. By bringing together partners from across the system, centring the voices of women with lived experience and producing evidence that is both rigorous and practically useful, this project has the potential to drive meaningful change – not just in Lancashire, but nationally.

At Lancashire Women, we have long believed that preventing harm requires more than individual support. It requires systems that work together, that are designed with women in mind and that treat trauma not as a complication but as a context. This evaluation will help us build the evidence to make that case and to support others to do the same.

A Note of Thanks

We are grateful to the Evaluation Task Force for recognising the importance of this work and for supporting Lancashire Women to lead it. We are also grateful to our partners across the Lancashire Female Justice Partnership, whose commitment to collaboration and whole-system working makes a project like this possible.

Most of all, we are grateful to the women who will share their experiences as part of this evaluation. Your voices matter more than any data point and this project exists because of you.